Pearl

“Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise, in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife